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posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 17 2014, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-can-we-use-it-for? dept.

Microsoft will soon offer a service aimed at making machine-learning technology more widely usable. "We want to bring machine learning to many more people," Eron Kelly, Microsoft corporate vice president and director SQL Server marketing, said of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, due to be launched in beta form in July. "The line of business owners and the marketing teams really want to use data to get ahead, but data volumes are getting so large that it is difficult for businesses to sift through it all," Kelly said. An offshoot of artificial intelligence, machine learning uses algorithms so that computers recognize behavior in large and streaming data sets. It can be superior to traditional forms of business intelligence in that it offers a way to predict future events and behavior based on past actions.

Refined in academia over the past several decades, machine learning is starting to catch on for business uses such as credit card fraud detection. Microsoft uses the technology to refine its Cortana personal phone assistant, as well as to plan how much hardware it will need to continue to build its Azure hosted computer services.

OK, so it perhaps has a role to play in business - but how can we use similar technology to improve the things that we do? Any ideas?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by LookIntoTheFuture on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:04PM

    by LookIntoTheFuture (462) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:04PM (#56633)
    "..plan how much hardware it will need to continue to build its Azure hosted computer services."

    I don't think they need machine learning to determine this. I can tell them right now: A core 2 duo with 2 gig of ram and a dsl connection. Done.
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:46PM

      by VLM (445) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:46PM (#56642)

      I was going to make the same joke about the Cortana but it turns out they're selling a shocking number of phones. I've never seen one in use in the wild, but a year ago there were 15 or so android sales per windows sale and its down to about 10 android sales per windows sale now in the USA. In .eu its still a 10:1 ratio and in China its nuts like 70:1.

      I checked the numbers for this post and the ratio of Android:IOS is astoundingly different across the world. Its darn near 1:1 in the USA with Android pulling barely ahead, but in Japan almost everyone buys ios and in .eu the numbers are even more lopsided to android.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @11:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @11:05AM (#57895)

      Answer 2 questions here http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=2401&cid=56617 [soylentnews.org] & you're more than welcome to validly technically disprove my points on hosts here also http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=2401&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=improvedthreaded&pid=56357#56595 [soylentnews.org] since you avoided them before ("gosh, I wonder why?" Not!) & yet you saw fit to give me orders? Do you own this site?? No, I doubt that.

      APK

      P.S.=> You're 1 of 4 types of people (bank on it):

      1.) Advertiser
      2.) Malware maker &/or botnet herders
      3.) Webmaster (I held the app back for them in fact, it was done, in 3 parts though in tty mode, as far back as 2003 here but when malvertizing went out of control, out the door she went to 'the masses' for the absolute good, since any idiot knows being destructive = easy, but doing good NEVER is, but it's worth it imo)
      4.) An INFERIOR competitor (e.g. - AdBlock, Ghostery, & RequestPolicy)

      * Doesn't 'take a brain' to realize THAT much - after all: THEY'RE THE ONES WHO GET "HURT" by it... problem is, THEY have been hurting others bandwidth/speed, security, & more for DECADES...

      Funniest part is that those technically unjustifiable downmods are "the best they got" but they certainly CAN'T get the better of me disproving my points on hosts files' mulitiple nigh ubiquitous value to end users...

      In fact? I'd almost WAGER per #5 above in this case, that it's Wladimir Palant (AdBlock creator) who wrote me by email, 1st, saying "hosts are a shitty solution" - well, when I confonted him in email reply to show me that "Almost ALL ADS BLOCKED" can do MORE than custom hosts? He refused to reply, & RAN like a scared rabbit - ESPECIALLY after this article study showed how massively INEFFICIENT in RAM (5gb usage) & HIGH CPU USAGE AdBlock is https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/ [mozilla.org] ... apk

  • (Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:33PM

    by Blackmoore (57) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:33PM (#56640) Journal

    On August 29, it gained self-awareness, and the panicking operators, realizing the extent of its abilities, tried to deactivate it. Skynet perceived this as an attack and came to the conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it. To defend itself against humanity,

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by hoochiecoochieman on Wednesday June 18 2014, @09:33AM

      by hoochiecoochieman (4158) on Wednesday June 18 2014, @09:33AM (#56850)

      Don't worry, it's just a super-intelligent version of Clippy.

      In the very worst case, it will unformat your 200-page MS Word thesis in a super-intelligent way, until you have to write it all over again using LaTeX. Tiresome, but hardly deadly.

      • (Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Wednesday June 18 2014, @01:27PM

        by Blackmoore (57) on Wednesday June 18 2014, @01:27PM (#56920) Journal

        at worse it assume control over the robots at an auto making plant.. and start building "the Homer"

  • (Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday June 17 2014, @10:05PM

    by Horse With Stripes (577) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @10:05PM (#56672)

    No, data centers dream of meatbag sheeple, or as they refer to them "customers".

  • (Score: 1) by Hawkwind on Tuesday June 17 2014, @11:56PM

    by Hawkwind (3531) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @11:56PM (#56697)

    Based on past experience I'll wait until version 6 comes out with service pack 2.